Etymology: A blend of “spud” (a digging implement) and “puddle,” first recorded in 1630; a verb that means “to work feebly” and “to be extremely busy while achieving absolutely nothing.”

Definition: The most mystifying thing about “spuddle” is its 17th-century origins. Working feebly may well be fundamental to the human experience, but it’s hard to imagine how one could be incredibly busy while achieving nothing when ploughing a field, say, or going to war with the Dutch. That the word has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years—online forums are full of people identifying with the term—is less surprising. Spuddling is an inescapable fact of the modern workplace, particularly if you have the kind of job where you are required to stare at a screen for any stretch of time that far outstrips the human mind’s capacity for true concentration.

Spuddling can be the result of unavoidable impositions on your time—whether that’s being forced to answer a chain of Hydra-like emails that only invite further replies, or sitting through an hour-long Zoom meeting, chiming in occasionally with an insightful contribution (“Yep, sounds good!”). For the most part, spuddling should be best thought of as an honest, diligent and good faith form of procrastination, one that is less about tricking your employers into believing you’re hard at work and more about tricking yourself. You might virtuously deny yourself the meager pleasures of scrolling through Vinted or reels of amusing animals, but still find that you're skirting around the task at hand—endlessly tinkering with a spreadsheet, say, or crafting a PowerPoint presentation with a Kubrickian attention to detail. There are, after all, many ways of technically “doing work” while achieving very little.

This behavior is both a product of the unreasonable demands of modern workplace culture and a failure to live up to its ideals of optimization and streamlined efficiency. It might be that, for you, four hours of spuddling is a necessary requirement for doing four hours of actual work. Even so, the sense of having achieved little for your efforts can leave you feeling at once exhausted and incompetent, frustrated and demoralized.